


Spellbound and hellbound and caught in the netting

by twincy



Category: Justified
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:12:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twincy/pseuds/twincy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Raylan reckons that’s true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spellbound and hellbound and caught in the netting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elzed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elzed/gifts).



Winona’s as pretty as she ever was, sitting in the courtroom in that tight little dress. Raylan watches from the other side of the room, watches from five years ago when he would brush her hair behind her ear just like she’s doing now. Maybe that’s when he knows that whatever he tried to tell himself in Miami, all those years he spent trying to forget, trying to feel anything but a faint stab of regret every time the long honey-skinned legs of some waitress or other wrapped around him - whatever he tried to tell himself in Miami about closing the book was a lie. Maybe that’s when he knows; more likely he’s always known.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and he reckons that’s true, but there’s something to be said for close proximity.

He’s almost grateful when his phone rings.

*

Ava’s as pretty as she ever was. Prettier even, in a way, filling out a tank top better than she ever did at sixteen, and there’s quiet confidence in the set of her jaw. Raylan wonders if the latter might be recent, something to do with ridding herself of her no-good husband by means of a shotgun. No one who’s met Bowman Crowder could honestly blame her, but if Raylan’s learned anything from Tommy Buck it’s that shooting people tends to get you in trouble, no matter how much they deserve it.

Raylan doesn’t seek out trouble, but trouble has a habit of finding him. When Ava leans in and presses her lips to his, it’s almost chaste. She smells of lavender and, faintly, of flour, like she’d been baking when he knocked.

“Wanna talk about mistakes?” she says.

*

Going back to Kentucky was a mistake, or it would’ve been if he’d had any choice in the matter. Might be he did, though he doesn’t like to dwell on that.

Between Boyd, his father, Ava and Winona, it’s as if his past has come to life, haunting him like the ghosts in that Charles Dickens story. He passes his old high school on his way to work and it looks exactly as he remembers it, but smaller, years and miles of distance rendering it all but insignificant.

Raylan wishes he could say the same about everything else, but he watches Winona walk away from him in the courthouse, heels clicking decisively on the marble floor, and it sounds just like the door of their apartment in Miami slamming shut, her car spluttering to life under the yellow cast of a streetlight before driving off.

The papers had come in the mail a week later. She’d always been efficient.

*

Ava unbuttons her dress with careful movements, precise, none of the exaggerated hip-sways and lip-pouts that pass for seduction in the minds of others. She slips the dress off her shoulders and steps out of it, forward, into the reach of Raylan’s arms. She’s naked apart from a pair of thin cotton panties that brush against the front of Raylan’s shirt when she climbs onto the bed to straddle him. She smiles as she bucks into him, this time in a way that can’t be mistaken for an accident, and starts to unbutton him with the same deft hands.

Raylan traces patterns on her freckled shoulders. The confidence he’d thought he’d seen in her before looks more like stubbornness from this angle; might be that’s what confidence is. Something about her nakedness makes her seem fragile, long-limbed like a foal. _I was sixteen when you left_ , she’d said, as if he didn’t remember. She’s not too young now, but he feels too old still.

*

Ava is a mistake but not like Winona, who comes to him in the night like a half-forgotten dream. She parks her car in front of his motel room and lets the door fall shut behind her. It’s the same dance as Miami, only in reverse. He wonders if she realises.

She’s wearing a trenchcoat and nothing else, like in the movies, and it slides off her like bourbon from a glass.

She’s different. Rough where Ava was gentle, no tenderness in the way her hand clenches in his hair. It’s nothing like he never imagined it to be. Her nails dig into the back of his neck when she kisses him, and Raylan thinks he understands, slides his hands up the back of her bare thighs and lifts her from her feet. Her legs wrap around him as if on cue. Raylan bites back a bitter word, thinks of all the times he pictured this, Winona coming back, apologetic and full of regret. In his mind they’d made love on the bed in their Miami apartment, on the backseat of the car she drove away in, and it’d been sweet and sad, and nothing like pushing her up against a motel room wall while one hand fumbles with his belt buckle, and she hardly even looks at him.

The walls are paper-thin but she’s never been loud. She comes quietly with Raylan’s lips on her throat, his thumb stroking her clit. She leaves even more quietly than that.

*

Might be none of it is even about him, he thinks, swirling the last of his bourbon around a plastic cup. It could be about Gary working late once, twice too many, coming home drunk or not at all. It could be about needing a warm body who is anyone, anyone but Boyd Crowder.

It could be about protection or distraction or it could be about nothing at all, just a series of fucks in a rank motel room, a bad decision for the sake of being able to make one.

He makes the same mistakes he did when he was nineteen, but there ain’t nowhere left to run to. He tries and fails and ends up here: on the edge of a bed listening to the song of her leaving. Footsteps, the slam of a door, a car spluttering to life under the neon glow of a vacancy sign.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from David Gray's "Forgetting".


End file.
